MARVEL STUDIOS: VARIOUS

During my time at Perception, one of the greatest thrills was getting to participate in Perception’s longstanding relationship with Marvel Studios. From early one-shots like Agent Carter and All Hail the King to their groundbreaking work on Iron Man II to the work we did during my tenure, this is some of the work that has most inspired our clients, not only in the VFX world but in the technology world as well.

One of the exciting areas of focus for us during my tenure was conceptual work in which our team collaborated with the filmmakers to help define specific visual elements. We did this for Captain America: Civil War and to an even larger extent for Doctor Strange. I expect to see even more of this sort of concept work from Perception in the future, as the Marvel Cinematic Universe continues to expand.

But as fun as these projects were to work on, one of the most amazing projects I’ve ever had the honor to be involved with was the creation of Marvel Studio’s new animated logo, the release of which was announced at Comic-Con 2016.

As any Marvel fan knows, this logo plays before every Marvel Studios film. So this project was both an awesome responsibility and an incredible opportunity for the Perception studio. Even for a studio accustomed to working in blockbuster films, this logo is a piece of work with incredible exposure.

I got to thinking to just how much exposure and started doing some math. After the Comic-Con announcement, the video was posted by various blogs and those have at least 500,000 views combined, but that’s just chump change since it also played before Doctor Strange. Box Office Mojo lists domestic box office for Doctor Strange at $231,646,917 and also has the average 2016 ticket price at $8.65. So that means almost 27,000,000 views in the US. But then you have to add in foreign box office of $432,915,844. It’s not so easy to estimate foreign ticket prices, but even if you assume a 25% premium over the US, that still means over 40,000,000 views. Plus when it comes out on streaming and DVD there will be a whole new wave of viewing. 100 million views seems like a fairly conservative estimate of long-range views of the film, then.

And that’s just Doctor Strange. This new logo will surely run before Marvel films for many years to come. So this minute-long piece will easily be seen hundreds of millions of times and it doesn’t seem at all outside the realm of possibility that it might ultimately be seen by more than a billion people. That’s pretty awe-inspiring. It may well dwarf the exposure of every other piece of work I’ve previously touched in my entire career.

I’m supremely grateful to my very talented team at Perception and all the very talented people at Marvel Studios to have been able to participate in the successful execution of such an incredible project.

Read the full case study behind the making of the Marvel Studios logo, and watch the “making of” video on Perception’s website.